Kallas rejects teachers’ pay demand, warning state has no funds

Education Minister Kristina Kallas has told pay negotiations that Estonia’s state budget has no money to raise teachers’ salaries unless spending is cut elsewhere, ERR reported. Education Workers’ Union representative Reemo Voltri warned that teachers could resort to strikes.

Kallas said it was practically impossible to add new spending to the state budget under the current economic conditions because revenue from economic growth would cover only increases in previously indexed costs, such as pensions and defence spending.

“We can plan a pay rise for teachers only if we cut somewhere else,” Kallas said. “We would simply have to move money from somewhere else and take it from someone in order to raise teachers’ pay.”

The minister said she did not consider the union’s demand to raise teachers’ minimum salary next year to the national average, or 2,312 euros, realistic.

“I certainly do not consider it realistic for teachers’ minimum pay to equal the national average, because most people in Estonia do not earn the national average,” Kallas said. She added that while teachers deserved such pay, “money is a measurable quantity and we simply do not have it in the state budget today.”

Kallas said teachers’ growing workload also needed to be addressed. She linked the increase partly to the rising number of children with special educational needs.

She referred to recent PISA study results showing that Estonia has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in Europe and a large number of small upper-secondary schools, which consume a significant share of education funding. Because of demographic changes, the number of children starting school will fall by 3,000 from 2028, reducing the per-student funding received by local governments and used to pay teachers.

Teachers seek long-term security

Voltri said the difficult state budget situation must not lead to a decline in the quality of education. He said teachers’ minimum expectation was a salary of 2,300 euros or the fulfilment of an election promise to keep their calculated average salary at 120 percent of the national average.

“If teachers’ salaries continue to fall compared with the national average, as they have done during this government’s term, it sends a very ominous message to current and future teachers,” Voltri said.

He added that this showed teachers were not being valued and could lead to a decline in the quality of education, a risk also highlighted by an analysis of the OECD’s PISA study.

Voltri said teachers were prepared to compromise and would accept a smaller pay rise than requested if the state budget strategy provided long-term certainty that promises would be fulfilled in the coming years. However, they would not accept a relative decline in pay.

“Teachers certainly cannot accept being told that salaries will not rise at all, meaning that we would immediately fall five or six percentage points behind average salary growth,” Voltri said.

He recalled that the previous strike had secured a 71-euro pay increase even when a rise had been considered impossible. An education workers’ demonstration will take place outside the Riigikogu on September 14, and Voltri said further strikes had not been ruled out.